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Finding Teaching Inspiration from Gorgias: Mathematics Lessons from a Sophist Journal of Humanistic Mathematics Volume 9 | Issue 1 January 2019 Finding Teaching Inspiration from Gorgias: Mathematics Lessons from a Sophist Ann L. von Mehren Bowling Green State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm Part of the Architectural History and Criticism Commons, Arts and Humanities Commons, Elementary Education Commons, International and Comparative Education Commons, Liberal Studies Commons, Mathematics Commons, and the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons Recommended Citation von Mehren, A. L. "Finding Teaching Inspiration from Gorgias: Mathematics Lessons from a Sophist," Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 9 Issue 1 (January 2019), pages 304-316. DOI: 10.5642/ jhummath.201901.18 . Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol9/iss1/18 ©2019 by the authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. JHM is an open access bi-annual journal sponsored by the Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences and published by the Claremont Colleges Library | ISSN 2159-8118 | http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/ The editorial staff of JHM works hard to make sure the scholarship disseminated in JHM is accurate and upholds professional ethical guidelines. However the views and opinions expressed in each published manuscript belong exclusively to the individual contributor(s). The publisher and the editors do not endorse or accept responsibility for them. See https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/policies.html for more information. Finding Teaching Inspiration from Gorgias: Mathematics Lessons from a Sophist Cover Page Footnote I would like to acknowledge the editors of the International Journal for Mathematics in Education, published by the Hellenic Mathematical Society (HMS i JME), for guiding comments on my earlier paper that led me to the work of Ivor Grattan-Guinness. I also thank this journal's editors and expert reviewer, whose comments encouraged my revision of this paper. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own. This work is available in Journal of Humanistic Mathematics: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol9/iss1/18 Finding Teaching Inspiration from Gorgias: Mathematics Lessons from a Sophist Ann L. von Mehren Department of English, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA [email protected] Synopsis The logos or rational language of the fifth-century B.C.E. teacher, Gorgias, as contained in the fragment On the Nonexistent [3], challenges a reader to under- stand the relationship between the existent and the nonexistent; yet the text also offers an accessible idea of logos. Inspired by William M. Priestley’s approach to the study of logos through ratios [10] and by Ivor Grattan-Guinness’s recommen- dation to broaden the study of historical texts in the history of mathematics and mathematics education, and pursue their significance in a heritage sense [4,5], this article suggests that this ancient non-mathematics text by Gorgias may in- spire and refresh elementary mathematics educators’ teaching of visualization and beginning points. Following the idea that a humanist is dedicated to participating in civic life more than strict contemplation [6, page 122], I have studied a non- mathematics ancient Greek text to think about teaching elementary mathe- matics. That text is On the Nonexistent [3], which is a set of lecture notes of the fifth-century B.C.E. Sophist teacher Gorgias. A historically signifi- cant teacher, Gorgias is thought to have taught rhetoric and philosophy, not mathematics. Yet he, like Protagoras, “answered any question anyone put to him” [14]. Looking at his text for ideas on how he taught a range of subjects and answered questions, I have found that his thoughts about concepts such as logos and beginning inspire me to think about how to teach several of the earliest elementary-school level mathematics concepts. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics Volume 9 Number 1 (January 2019) Ann L. von Mehren 305 1. Historical Gorgias or Heritage Gorgias Gorgias, after establishing himself as a thinker, teacher, and public speaker in his birthplace of Leontini, Sicily, travelled to Athens in 427 B.C.E. Taking up the typical wandering path of the Sophist teacher, he “refused to settle down in any city but went all around Greece to deliver his speeches” [7, page 92]. Several of his lectures survive through notes taken by students. In our time, he has been interpreted mostly as a rhetor or a philosopher. Only Edward Schiappa, a historian of ancient rhetoric, has suggested Gorgias was a “proto-scientific” Greek thinker [13]. However, Schiappa’s view is consid- ered controversial in the field of rhetoric; most history of rhetoric scholars emphasize what there is to learn from Gorgias about the rhetorical artistry of his speech forms (see for example [2]). In addition, insofar as it is studied as philosophy, there is dissension on whether there is any value to On the Nonexistent [3]. Taylor and Lee [14] state the following in the entry of “The Sophists” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: We have a philosophical essay ‘On Non-Being or On Nature’ (DK 82B3), purporting to be a rebuttal of Parmenides, in which he maintains that nothing exists, that if anything did exist it could not be known and that if anything could be known it could not be communicated. What can definitely be said is that it shows some knowledge of Parmenides, that it at least raises serious philo- sophical questions, such as the relation of thought to reality and the possibility of referring to things which do not exist, that no question which it raises is developed to any significant extent and that most of its arguments are extremely feeble. It reads like a piece written by a clever man with no real interest in philosophy, but it is doubtful whether we shall ever know why he wrote it. To make clear from the start, I am not entering into any such debates. Instead, when reading this text for teaching inspiration, I am drawing on the scholarly understanding I have gained from Ivor Grattan- Guinness, a historian and philosopher of mathematics and logic, who believes that renewed attention “to the broad features of history may well enrich the inheritance” of mathematics education [4, page 168]. 306 Finding Teaching Inspiration from Gorgias As a proposition for the applicability of studying ancient texts, Grattan- Guinness suggests that when interpreting a “mathematical notion N” one should pursue a full range of approaches, from looking at one notation to a whole branch of mathematics. He includes within this broad range the “ways of teaching” mathematical notions [5, page 1]. Furthermore, Grattan- Guinness carefully admonishes scholars not to confuse “history” with “her- itage” readings [5, page 1]. Since I am interested in ways of teaching mathematics, I am only reading Gorgias as a Sophist teacher willing to take “any question” insofar as I am rhetorically asking questions about how to teach when I read Gorgias, in Grattan-Guinness’s heritage sense. I am not doing any scholarship related to anything in the field of the history of ancient Greek mathematics or phi- losophy. I find in Gorgias pedagogical ideas and “ways of teaching” elemen- tary mathematics concepts that are difficult to teach. In fact, I have found inspiration within On the Nonexistent for quite a few “ways of teaching” elementary-school level mathematics lessons (see [15]). 2. Questions of Sophistic or Misguided Teaching I do not know Greek, so I am working only with a translated text, in this paper, when I am sharing how Gorgias’s On the Nonexistent [3] has inspired me to think about what I am doing, as a teacher. As another proviso, I note that the historical figure, Gorgias of Leontini, is the subject of one work by Plato, Gorgias, and that Plato’s work is sometimes considered as the only “Gorgias,” but that book and the historical figure Gorgias should not be so confused; I have not included anything from Plato in my consideration of Gorgias. Finally, I should acknowledge that Gorgias has historically been considered, along with Protagoras, as offering “deductive schemes” such as “the scheme called ‘consequentia mirabilis’ in the Middle Ages (a variant of the proof by contradiction, consisting in proving A by proving that non-A implies A)” [12, page 173]. Without embarrassment, I must ask for the reader’s tolerance, in hopes they do not leap to the conclusion that, by using Grattan-Guinness, I am somehow seeking to prove or to imply that Gorgias was a scientific or mathematical thinker in his day. Instead, I ask for acceptance that, as a former eighth-grade mathematics teacher for a few years, I have had challenges in communicating Ann L. von Mehren 307 to students and getting them to remember and draw on very early mathe- matics concepts. Part of my motivation to read broadly, outside traditional mathematics pedagogy, for teaching ideas is to contemplate what is known as “math anxiety,” where students forget what they have learned. Gerardo Ramirez has explained that one reason for it “is an adaptive process to reduce the accessibility of irrelevant information that no longer provides utility or value” [11, page 17]. I will discuss some irrelevant information, such as too many units of mea- surement that students are required to memorize, in the section “Logos and Visualization in Mathematics Education” below. Briefly here, I will note that it is generally understood that the fifth-century B.C.E. Sophists taught about mnemonic devices (see for example the Wikipedia article, “Mnemonic”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic, last accessed on January 28, 2019). At the same time as I credit the ancient teacher Gorgias with inspiration for thinking about memorization, I hope to show that I am aware of the contem- porary pedagogical criticism about misguided teaching of scientific language (following Berkenkotter and Huckin [1]) and also the extensive research avail- able on the difficulties of teaching students to transfer between conceptual systems (Perkins [8] and Perkins and Salomon [9]).
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